Purple Haze: "Color Out of Space" wildly strange, hopeless Lovecraftian madness

Color Out of Space (2020)

110 min.

Release Date: January 24, 2020 (Limited)

The apparent rule in any H.P. Lovecraft tale is to never get too emotionally attached to any of the characters because they are most likely hopeless from page one. Deserving a grand return after being fired from the notoriously troubled production of 1996’s fascinatingly messy H.G. Wells adaptation “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” writer-director Richard Stanley seems to be kindred spirits with the horrific imagination of Lovecraft, adapting the 1927 short story “The Colour Out of Space” with co-writer Scarlett Amaris and updating the setting from the nineteenth century to the present day. Add another increasingly lunatic Nicolas Cage performance to this cosmic sci-fi horror family drama that shares a little DNA with “The Tommyknockers” and “Annihilation,” and “Color Out of Space” is like being trapped in a trippy, neon-infused nightmare where a happy ending cannot exist.

Nathan Gardner (Nicolas Cage) has retreated from the city to live in an inherited Massachusetts farmhouse and raise alpacas with his family, cancer-afflicted online-trader wife Theresa (Joely Richardson) and their three children, Wicca-practicing Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), pot-smoker Benny (Brendan Meyer) and youngest son Jack (Julian Hilliard). Just as Lavinia is performing a ritual by a river to rid her mother of cancer, hydrologist Ward Phillips (Elliot Knight) comes by to survey the local water, just hours before a purple-glowing meteorite strikes and lands in the Gardner family’s yard. At first, the fireball gets local news attention. Then strange purple flowers bloom on the ground and the family’s crops grow larger. Then the color out of space comes alive as a plasma, infecting everything, including the Gardners.

Before the meteorite even enters the picture and shit officially hits the fan, “Color Out of Space” has a deliberate but necessary build to invest in the warm, but not entirely uncontentious, family dynamic. Though a little more urgency might have helped things along, director Stanley expertly crafts apprehension out of a simple dinner preparation, as Theresa chops carrots, and a check-up on those damn alpacas that need to be milked in the barn. This being a Lovecraftian tale, there is enough grotesque imagery that will linger in the mind. The gooey practical effects work is reminiscent of John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” particularly when two bodies are fused together to make a nastily mutated monster, and composer Colin Stetson (2018’s “Hereditary”) has orchestrated a creepy, otherworldly score to perfectly suit the material.

As a small-budget effort based on an author’s work that can be challenging to translate from the page, “Color Out of Space” is swing-for-the-fences ambitious in terms of what director Stanley is able to accomplish, rarely veering off from his serious tone of a family being destroyed. The origins of the violet-colored devastation are never explained on a cellular level, nor should they be to remain consistent with something alien that cannot be understood. Nicolas Cage doesn’t quite reach the next-level nuttiness and wounded heart that he displayed in Panos Cosmatos’ phantasmagoric “Mandy,” but he does bonkers scenery-chewing quite well once Nathan Gardner experiences the purple haze, while Joely Richardson is affecting and then gets to be horrifying as Theresa. The sanest performance, at least for a while, comes from Madeleine Arthur (2018’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”), who’s rebellious yet empathetic, flawed yet proactive, as Lavinia. Brutal, wildly strange and unsparing, “Color Out of Space” takes the unknowable and drops it close to home.

Grade: B